The Valve is leaking
Everybody was excited when Valve announced that Steam would (finally) be coming to the Mac. Now it’s here and I have to say … uhm … wow! Great job, Valve.
This is what happens when a PC company (Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft employees) starts coding for the Mac and makes stupid assumptions. Like hardcoding Tahoma as the UI font in Portal and not specifying a fallback in case people have wiped this atrocity off their harddrives. <Sigh!>
Now I remember why I left PC gaming for consoles. Stuff usually works over there.
…
That being said, it’s great to have the Mac be a viable gaming platform again. I’m not sure how porting houses like Westlake or Aspyr feel about this but it’s certainly good for the end user. So I guess I shouldn’t bitch too much …
The Font of the Future
Why do video games still use Eurostile as their on-screen font for menues and subtitles? Does it still signify “modern” and “The Future”? It’s from friggin’ 1962!
During the 60s and 70s Eurostile became the science fiction font to use if you wanted “that space-look”. It even was on the official Apollo 10 patch and got as close as 14 km to the moon – how much more futuristic can you get?
But that was 40 years ago and you might think that our concept of “futuristic” would have changed over time, right? Yet here we are in 2004 …
And 2010 isn’t any better: Even Final Fantasy XIII, a game so recent that it hasn’t come out yet just came out in Europe and the US, uses Eurostile (or a close variant) for the subtitles.
It’s not that I have anything against Eurostile, it’s just such an odd choice for a screen font because while it may score in the style-department, it won’t get credits for legibility.
